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The question "is cold fusion real?" has been around since 1989 when Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, two of the world's leading electrochemists, rather prematurely announced that they had achieved this phenomena in a test tube in their lab.

Cold fusion, otherwise called Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR), is, theoretically, the fusing together (rather than a chemical reaction) of elements at "normal" temperatures such that they release more energy than is required to fuse them.

This is an idea that is incredibly appealing because if it could be achieved it would provide mankind with, again in theory, incredibly cheap energy. In practice, there could be drawbacks such as pollution and radiation but until cold fusion is actually demonstrated and developed, no one knows.

Hot fusion, on the other hand, is the process by which elements would be fused together at temperatures and pressures only found naturally in stars.

While hot fusion, yet again theoretically, would create more energy than it would to induce fusion the conditions required are so extreme that rather than a simple test tube it requires machines the size of houses and enormous supporting facilities that bring the whole project up to factory scale (see the National Ignition Facility). Hot fusion is also guaranteed to have radioactive waste products.

Unfortunately it turned out that the Fleischmann and Pons experiment was not reliably reproducible. In the academic fracas that followed, both men's reputations were ruined and the field was quickly relegated to the domain of "fringe" science along with perpetual motion, telekinesis, and anti-gravity.

While mainstream science was apparently quite happy with this situation and went about spending billions of dollars on "hot" fusion (there are many who claim that cold fusion was systematically marginalized and deprecated by establishment scientists), a few "rogue" researchers continued with cold fusion research and, over the last few years, evidence has piled up that cold fusion may, in fact, be real.

I wrote "may ... be real" because until recently the evidence looked promising but hardly conclusive.

I know that there will be a handful of people (the "believers" I wrote about some time ago) who read that statement and cry "lies" but the fact is that no one has yet demonstrated, definitively, that cold fusion or LENR exists in a form that is actually useful.

Since then just over a year has passed with Rossi having done a couple of unconvincing demos (the biggest and least convincing was on October 28 last year). I could go on at length about the endless news items about Rossi but the bottom line is that to all intents and purposes the E-Cat is still vaporware ... it's all still "jam tomorrow."

As for the rest of the companies that have announced they're developing cold fusion devices only one stands out: Defkalion Green Technologies, a company based in Greece ...